If you thought bottled water was the biggest scam ever, let's go that one better on the absurdity scale:
“I’ll start with an order of water, move on to some H20, and, to drink, I’d like a glass of your finest vintage water.”
The above restaurant order is fictitious but the menu is not. Neither is the restaurant. Its name is Molecule, and it is the first water-only café to open in New York City and possibly the nation.
So what’s so special about the water at Molecule? Is it distilled from the most pristine mountain stream on the planet? No, actually it comes from a New York City tap, but the restaurant justifies charging $1 and up per serving because their water is filtered through a custom-built $25,000 purifier that “uses ultraviolet rays, ozone treatments and reverse osmosis in a seven-stage processing treatment.”
[. . .]
So far, food critics have been less than enthusiastic. TheNew York Post‘s Steve Cuozzo conducted a blind taste test comparing Molecule’s fancified tap water with bottled varieties from Poland Spring, Evian, Fiji, and plain unadulterated tap water. His verdict: “Molecule was the only one I didn’t like,” adding that their product is “’pure’ nonsense,” pun intended.
Other notices include Jen Doll’s at the Atlantic Wire (“Artisanal water: It’s what you sell when people will buy anything”) and James King’s at The Village Voice (“Calling all suckers …. We’re not sure what’s more unsettling: the fact that an East Village business is selling tap water for $2.50 a bottle, or that countless idiots will probably buy it”).
Nice to know, I guess, that no matter how bad the economy gets, there will still be plenty of those "people who will buy anything." How much should I charge for my air bar, to which you can come and breathe specially filtered air instead of that plain old crap God stuck us with?
